There is something strange and unsettling about living within a body and at times being so keenly aware of that body, and at other times observing this thing from the outside. One moment, feeling every nerve, every joint, ever stretch and tensing of the muscles. The next, existing solely as a hypothetical. Understanding that there is a body in which you are tied, but not having any real sense of what that means.

I often struggle to feel control of my mind and body. Between chronic pain and fatigue, grueling mental stress, and an innate distrust of my own perceptions, there is no wonder why I journey through these phases of sensory overstimulation or complete dissociation. My body often feels not like a safe haven or a medium through which I can experience the world, but like a thing that I must manage and shape and drag through the day with me. To me, my body has rather become like an entity. A thing of its own, with its own experiences, goals, abilities.

Young writes, “We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the media for the enactment of our aims” in Throwing Like A Girl. And how true these observances ring for me! As a child, I had trusted my body so much. I hiked and climbed and ran and I was a gymnast, performing stunts that required so much control and trust in my body. But as I grew older, I was cautioned and held back and encouraged to be less rambunctious, to be more ladylike, to be safe, calm, quiet. I was inundated with the fears and anxieties of my mother, with the expectations of politeness from my church and school community, with the judgment from the other children at school, encouraged to become something digestable, something other than the rowdy and adventurous child that I was. I tried desperately to be what everyone wanted me to be, to be likeable, to escape from the constant deluge of opinions and rules and admonitions. I ran away into my mind, focused on school, read books, read people, became a chameleon. I stopped running, playing. Had to quit gymnastics as we moved, and never joined another sport, lost touch with my body. I became so lost, so depressed. I wasn’t myself, didn’t know who “me” was or could be, didn’t know how to find her. I was terrified of being perceived yet so vastly lonely and desperate to be seen. I didn’t know how to reconcile these opposing needs, and my brain learned how to just turn off, to walk away from it all while my body went through the motions of the day. I was not living an embodied experience, in the way that Kosut and Moore describe, or really even living at all. I simply existed.

It took me being harassed and assaulted to hit my limit, to decide that I needed to be present within my body, to be a person again, or at least try, before I really went off the deep end. An intense anger fueled me for two years as I worked to learn who I was, what I thought and believed, gave me strength to shed the skins I had grown to disguise myself, to shed the need for approval, to be willing to stand as a person outside the expectations of my parents, of my peers. It took another two years to realize that part of why I had struggled so much in the first place was that I was raised and expected to behave and think the way a neurotypical person would, but I wasn’t neurotypical. Definitely ADHD, most likely autistic, my brain functions so differently from what was seen as “normal” and when I expressed those traits it was labeled as weird or defiant or annoying. I learned to mask those traits, my body learned to turn itself off and dissociate in order to fit into the expectations of those around me. When I realized those things, I finally began to come back into my body, to feel as though it were MINE. And then the consequences of long term shut down and chronic stress began to take effect. Chronic illness struck, pain and hormones and fatigue combining to make this body that I had once trusted my enemy. I sought the things that had brought me a sense of joy and freedom and belonging in my childhood, ran back into nature. But now, I was living in a body I didn’t know, one that had changed with age and had betrayed me. I monitored myself constantly, hedging myself, not taking any risks lest I create more pain for myself. I lost my sense of wonder. Like Young, hiking across a stream was not something I could do without thinking, without planning, it was something to assess, to plan. I needed a safeguard, that branch from the tree to balance me. I had spent so long not using my strength. my balance, my physicality to exist in the world, that to do so now required energy.

I miss myself sometimes, that young girl who might have made a game of jumping from rock to rock to cross a stream, who would have climbed to the top of the pines and swayed in the wind with them, who might have sprinted across a field without fear of rolled ankles or a migraine that lasts a week. I grieve the woman I could have been without fear, without the strain of existence weighing her down, that caused her to lose herself so thoroughly in her youth. I wonder what it would be like to live fully within my body, what it would have been like to live without pain and fatigue, had I had the chance.